The relentless beat of horrifying school shootings feels like an unending trend. The contemporary threat of violence in American schools — there have been 377 school shootings since Columbine in 1999 — has incontrovertibly changed the nature of campuses: law enforcement and security presence has increased, even the youngest schoolchildren routinely perform lockdown drills, and students are heavily scrutinized by counselors and peers for any signs that they might perpetrate violence.
Researchers reported a 70 percent decrease in reports of guns being carried on school campuses in California.
Headlines might lead one to believe that violence in schools is inexorably on the rise. Yet at least one state in the union has, intriguingly, bucked this trend: California. We are not talking about a small blip: impressively, "measures of violence" in California schools are down precipitously over the past two decades. Understanding what the state is doing right, and whether other states can emulate their policies, might be key to lessening the number of school shootings.
The research comes from a new study from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) that traces violent trends at schools in California. The research, published in the World Journal of Pediatrics, analyzed nearly two decades of data encompassing 6.2 million students from more than 3200 middle and high schools in California. Across the board, all measures of violence dropped over the 18 year period. And these reductions were clear in 95 percent of all California schools, not just the ones in wealthy districts.
Researchers reported a 70 percent decrease in reports of guns being carried on school campuses in California, a similar trend (68 percent) for other weapons like knives and a 56 percent drop in physical fights. All of this goes in the "opposite direction" of public perception that school violence is a growing problem, the authors report.
"The reductions in school violence raise the possibility that the efforts, norm shifts, and two decades of massive social investment in school safety contributed to dramatically less victimization for California's students," the authors write. "The sharp declines in rates of victimization at school should be part of the public policy discourse that is currently overshadowed by school shootings."
The UCLA researchers define school violence as "any behavior intended to harm, physically or emotionally, individuals in school, their property, or their school's property," which covers bullying, physical violence, theft, property damage, weapon use, sexual harassment and assault.
To see how these issues are trending, they drew from the California Healthy Kids Survey, which is an anonymous survey given twice a year. The questionnaire asks students about their experiences being victimized, either with weapons or from physical abuse such as being shoved, slapped or kicked, as well as being harassed based on their race, religion, gender identity or disability. It also asked about "school climate" or the feeling of safety, belongingness and adult support. There were larger declines in victimization reported by Black and Latino students compared to white students, but regardless of ethnicity, the decline was significant across the board.
However, this data was from 2001 to 2019, notably before the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily shuttered schools. It's not clear if these trends have changed, but given the level of mental health issues related to the pandemic, it might be expected that trends in violent outbursts reversed.
Nonetheless, what we can glean from this data could be applied to school safety in the future.
"Relatively speaking, few studies have been done collecting this data, as it was conceived as a tool to help schools and school districts at the local level," Ron Avi Astor, a professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and one of the study's co-authors, told Salon in an email. "Cleaning and pulling this data is a massive task and took us more than four years to do ... We stopped at 2019 since so few schools were open in 2020 and 2021 and the return also had many missing students due to COVID-19 issues. Hence going till 2019 makes sense given most everyone we met believes it was going up over those two decades. Not sure how reliable the data is during COVID and afterwards. Starting this year [it] would be good to look at, since almost everyone is back full time."
"There are several indications that the pandemic led to multiple negative mental health outcomes for children and adolescents and that returning to school may be associated with higher levels of school violence," Astor and his colleagues concluded in the paper, urging officials to monitor this potential increase closely. "It is important to learn from the policies and interventions that have helped reduce school violence in the last two decades to face these new challenges."
It's not entirely clear what is driving this trend. This is a observational study, meaning it looked at data in the past and isn't designed to looked at causal factors. Additionally, this kind of data isn't always easy to obtain — not every state collects it like California does — and it often relies on small sample sizes. However, Astor said that similar trends are being seen nationally, as well is in Canada and many South American and European countries. "[It] seems like if countries and states work hard at it and provide resources, the capacity of people trained to work on it, and policy, we start seeing reductions in day-to-day violence," Astor said.
This study was able to analyze more than six million student opinions, demonstrating that something California is doing is clearly working, which future research can hopefully tease out in detail.
"The reductions in school violence raise the possibility that the efforts, norm shifts, and two decades of massive social investment in school safety contributed to dramatically less victimization for California's students," Astor and his co-authors wrote. "However, more detailed and nuanced mixed methods and qualitative studies are needed to better understand whether the implementation of these collective policies possibly reduced victimization levels. Furthermore, it is important to study to what extent findings in California are similar to other regions that may implement different programs and policies."
Because it involves children, school violence is always devastating, but despite endless rashes of gun violence in schools and other spaces, yet overall things seem to be trending in the right direction, at least in California.
"The researchers make important points that are most often not addressed in the news. That is, nationally there has been a reduction in the total victimization rates, and specific crimes occurring in schools," Dr. Philip Lazarus, an associate professor at Florida International University, who was not involved in the research, told Salon by email. He emphasized the difference between typical school violence with the horrors of school shootings.
"In the first wave of school shooters starting in the late 1990s, the shooters typically were students in the school which they attacked," Lazarus said. "Now we have perpetrators that were former students coming back to attack the school as well as other violent shooters who had no connection to the school at all and just wanted to kill as many people as they could. We need to make a distinction and not list all violent attacks at school as connected or related to the present climate and culture of the school."
"Each school shooting is a devastating act that terrorizes the nation, and there is a growing sense in the public that little has changed in two decades to make schools safe," Astor said in a statement. "But mass shootings are just one part of this story. Overall, on a day-to-day basis for most students, American schools are safer than they've been for many decades."
